Too much AI, not enough upgrades

Design

• Google has nailed the colours
• The only real ‘small’ Android phone with these specs
• HiLight completely misses the mark

I absolutely love the look of the Pixel 11 Pro, especially in the Olive colour Google provided for review. I wouldn’t usually start a review talking about the colour choices, but Google has absolutely nailed them this year. Olive is a lovely shade of moody green, Canyon is a very tasteful pinky red that eschews gaudiness, while Fog is fresh and a nice take on the traditional silver finish. 

Even Obsidian, the typically boring black, is made more interesting by offering matte sides, rather than the glossy finish on the other colours.

The design itself isn’t that different from the Pixel 10 Pro. The camera bar is slightly cleaner, with the glass covering running edge-to-edge instead of only halfway. This camera visor remains large, but at least that means the phone rests comfortably on a table without jumping around when you’re trying to check notifications.

Google has said that all models in the Pixel 11 series are made with 100% recycled elements in the magnets and 100% recycled lithium in the battery.

As always, there are two versions of the Pixel 11 Pro – well, three if you count the Fold, but that’s a different beast. The standard Pixel 11 Pro sits alongside the larger Pixel 11 Pro XL and both feature mostly the same specs aside from obvious battery and screen changes. For me though, the standard 6.3-inch Pixel 11 Pro offers a far more exciting prospect than its 6.8-inch sibling.

This is one of the few ‘small’ Android phones that offers a mostly flagship feature set. There are options this size from Samsung and Xiaomi in the Galaxy S26 and Xiaomi 17; however, both those feel noticeably hamstrung compared to their Pro and Ultra stablemates.

The Pixel 11 Pro is a similar overall size to the iPhone 17 Pro, and marginally lighter than the Pixel 10 Pro at 204g. 

It’s a lovely phone to hold, and as I have said in previous years, this design works so much better in a smaller size. The soft, rounded sides and flat back nestle wonderfully in my palm, and it’s such a comfortable phone to hold.

Probably the biggest ‘change’ this year is the addition of HiLight, a rebranding of the camera LED into something more akin to a notification light. This is an 11 Pro series-only feature, so you won’t find it on the Pixel 11.

To be as blunt as possible, HiLight, in its current form, is completely pointless. All it does is turn blue when you talk to Gemini (although it doesn’t always seem to do this in my testing) and flash a variety of colours when a call comes in. And, of course, you need to have your phone face down to see it. 

There’s no support currently for third-party apps, other sorts of notifications or even text messages. The light is perfectly placed to turn red when you’re recording, for example.  Considering how clever Nothing has made the addition of lights on the back of its phone to indicate timers and various other tricks, I find it bizarre that Google has done so little with it here.

Screen

• 6.3-inch screen – a rare size for an Android phone
• Gets very bright
• Gorilla Glass Victus 2 with anti-scratch coating

6.3 inches is a rare size for an Android phone in 2026, but it’s great that this size still exists. It’s also great that it’s a very good screen overall, even if there isn’t much difference here compared to what you’d find on the Pixel 10 Pro.

The OLED panel, which can still move between 1-120Hz, can get marginally brighter this year. It can peak at 3600 nits, rather than 3300, and 2400 in ‘high brightness mode’ as opposed to 2200. The display can impressively push its brightness up when being used in direct sunlight, and HDR video played through Netflix looks great.

HDR support is HDR10+ rather than Dolby Vision, although this has always been the case with Pixel phones.

Google has said that the display has a new coating that is ‘twice as scratch-resistant’ as before, even though it retains the same Gorilla Glass Victus 2. It has even said that this coating means you can throw the phone in a bag with keys and not worry about it. I’m not sure I would ever do that, but the extra peace of mind is nice, and you shouldn’t need to worry about accidentally putting it in a pocket with loose change. 

Camera

• Triple rear camera array
• 120x Pro Zoom feature
• 42MP selfie shooter with autofocus

Once the best camera phone on the market, the Pixel range isn’t quite the king of the category anymore. Chinese giants, like Oppo and Xiaomi, have advanced faster, with bigger camera sensors, unique zoom add-ons, and partnerships with camera houses like Leica and Hasselblad. Google has taken the Pixel in a different direction, focusing more on using Gemini to improve the photo experience than hardware specs.

The Pixel 11 Pro sports three rear cameras: a 50MP main, 48MP ultrawide and 48MP telephoto. There’s also a 42MP camera around the front. These specs are mostly the same as last year, but there are improvements with the new ISP inside the Tensor G6 and plenty of software functionality.

For instance, you can now customise the camera ‘looks’. These are similar to Styles on an iPhone, and allow you to tweak the entire image pipeline, so it’s more than just enabling a filter. There are four to choose from: Original, Natural, Shadows and Vanilla. Vanilla is warmer, while Shadows, predictably, ups the shadows for a more contrasty look. Natural tones down the punchy colours a little, and makes things a little softer as a result.

You can save your preferred style, like you can on an iPhone, and tweak it further if required. It’s certainly nice to have, even though I have always been quite fond of the standard, contrast-heavy look of Pixel photos.

Another neat trick built into the camera app is Creator Suite, which includes a very welcome teleprompter feature that overlays text on the screen so you can read it while recording yourself. It might be niche, but incredibly useful for those who will utilise it.

Gemini is predictably everywhere in the camera. A new feature I am less impressed with is Magic Capture. With this, you just sort of press go and let the camera take its pictures and video. I’m not convinced of the point of this, and the results I got were all far worse than if I just took a few pictures. Google says it’s good for capturing kids or sports, but I don’t have enough trust in it to risk missing the actual picture I want for a selection of ‘meh’ ones.

Zoom is another area touched by Gemini’s artificial hand. You can push the phone to zoom to 120x. Google says that is done through a combination of the new tele sensor, which lets in 50% more light, and a more powerful TPU in the Tensor G6 chip. However, this zoom also uses ‘improved models’ running on device, so what you see in the images might not be what you actually see. For some, that might not be an issue – but I don’t want a photo of something that doesn’t exactly exist.

I’ve tested the 120x zoom on various occasions, and it can work. I took a photo out of my 6th-floor flat of a tree, and it tidied it up into a sharp image. Try it on a person or animal, though, and the results are wildly unrealistic. Skin is so oddly smooth, and the results look more like a cartoon. It’s all a bit weird.

Results are much better with the 5x, 10x, and even at times the 30x zoom. I’ve snapped some excellent shots switching between these focal lengths, and these offer real versatility. Colours between the focal lengths are similar, and it all happens very quickly.

Photos from the main camera are good. Often really good, but they’re still very much snaps from a smartphone camera. There’s less depth than what you can get from models with large sensors like the Xiaomi 17 Ultra and the Oppo Find X9 Ultra, and this is especially noticeable with landscape shots. Still, there are loads of details when you get up close to objects and pets.

The Pixel 11 Pro camera is reliable, and that’s important. It’s fast to shoot, open and move between options. I haven’t had an instance where I haven’t snapped a usable shot, and it takes very little effort to get good pictures. That can’t always be said for the more complicated phone camera systems out there.

It’s as reliable at night too, even if, again, it’s no longer king. Night Sight is noticeably quicker here. There’s now an ‘Instant’ Night Sight setting that dispenses with the processing, although it is limited to 12MP stills and 10x zoom and lower. The results are good, with enough light pulled out and detail kept. Like the rest of this camera, low-light shooting is reliable and more often than not produces a very good photo.

Performance

• Tensor G6 isn’t a GPU beast
• 12 or 16GB RAM, so in theory a downgrade
• 512GB and 1TB sizes use faster UFS storage

Perhaps the most interesting aspect is the Tensor G6 chipset powering the whole phone and the slight change in RAM and storage compared to before.

The Pixel 10 Pro came with 16GB RAM as standard, but started at a meagre 128GB of onboard storage. The Pixel 11 Pro doubles that starting storage to 256GB, but unless you pay more for the 512GB or 1TB models, the RAM has actually dropped to 12GB. A result of the huge price increases we’ve seen on memory in the past year.

This review is based around the 16GB model, so I can’t say for sure whether the drop in RAM will make a noticeable difference day-to-day.

Powering the 11 Pro is the Tensor G6, Google’s latest in-house-designed chip that is supposed to focus more on AI performance. Google claims the new chip boasts an upgraded Image Signal Processor, and a 50% more powerful Tensor Processing Unit to handle computational photography more quickly. That TPU also allows for the latest Gemini Nano AI model to run quicker. The G6 is paired with the Titan M3 chip for security.

Throughout my time with the 11 Pro, the AI performance has felt very good. There’s minimal waiting for answers, ‘proactive’ suggestions appear quickly, and the camera doesn’t stutter too much during processing. Great.

Elsewhere though, performance is a mixed bag, especially in gaming situations, where the Pixel 11 Pro really struggles. Some of my issues with the gaming performance could be put down to unoptimised software, so there’s always the chance that if the titles I tested get updated, then things could improve. But I can only judge what I have seen, and that isn’t very good.

Genshin Impact, a high-end game I’d expect to run well on any £/$1000+ phone, is completely broken here. It’s unplayable with broken shaders and utterly dreadful performance. To get Wuthering Waves to even play, I had to turn all the graphical settings to the lowest possible, and even then, the experience was poor. My real-world experience was backed up by GPU benchmarks, which put the Pixel 11 Pro more in line with phones half the price. 

In other benchmarks, including those that look at single-core and multi-core performance of the CPU, the Pixel 11 Pro scored similarly to the 10 Pro, and again far lower than the very best Android phones.

I typically wouldn’t put too much stock in benchmarking, but when paired with my real-world testing, it is currently clear this is not a phone for gamers – even those who want to dip their toes in occasionally.

It’s not just general performance that is a bit off, but the thermals don’t seem great either. Throughout my time with the Pixel 11 Pro, it has consistently gotten warm – not just when gaming, but in tasks like photo editing and video recording. It has been particularly hot in the UK, so that isn’t going to help matters, and small phones often struggle with this more than larger ones in any case.

In the US, the phone is eSIM-only. However, in the UK and other regions, there’s still a SIM slot on the top for a physical card. You can still use eSIM everywhere.

Connectivity ticks all the boxes, including Wi-Fi 7 and BT6, and Google says there’s a new modem onboard. In speed tests, the download speeds (on both 5G and over Wi-FI 7) are lower than an iPhone 17 Pro Max; however, the upload speeds are more than double. 

Software

• Gemini is king here
• Many years of software updates and feature drops
• Not everything is available everywhere, and that’s a shame

You used to buy a Pixel phone for the camera; now I’d say you buy one for the software. This is a Gemini phone more than anything, and Google’s AI can be found everywhere. Like all AIs, it’s a mixture of useful additions and one you’ll never touch, but even for those who are staunchly against AI, there will likely be something here that’ll come in useful.

Upon release, not all Gemini features are available everywhere – with the UK missing out on some key additions. Proactive Assistant, for instance, is one of the big tentpole skills and it’s absent from my review unit completely. This reads what’s on your screen and offers personalised and timely suggestions depending on what it sees. 

You’ll see cards pop up: messages for restaurant suggestions, airline tickets and calendar schedules. If you’re at a restaurant, it can appear on your homescreen and offer up a link to the menu and suggested dishes to order. These proactive features are available in the US, CA, AU, JP, IN, SG and MY.

Out of the features that are available in the UK, Rambler is the one I have used daily – and it’s great. This is a much smarter way of dictating messages, with the AI understanding what you’re trying to say and removing rambling words. If I am dictating a shopping list, for example, and I first suggest chicken but then correct myself and say beef, it’ll ignore chicken completely. I use an app called Wispr Flow for dictating messages on a Mac, and this is a similar idea.

Gemini is a very good mobile AI in many instances. Open it up in WhatsApp, for instance, and it can read the screen. So, if my wife has said a few ingredients we have in the fridge, I can ask Gemini to “suggest some dishes with those ingredients”, and it’ll know the ones I am talking about. It’s these little things that I like, and that keep me going back.

Some features are harder to spot, though. Magic Cue arrived last year, and is supposed to offer ‘useful details and time-saving actions’ – although I can’t say I have ever noticed it doing anything. Even though it’s on.

As with all AI, there’s a certain amount of slop. The writing tools are mostly useless and always sound wildly unnatural to me, as are the image and Omni video creation tools. I think they all look rubbish and are a real threat to creativity everywhere. 

I won’t go into the Android 17 features on the whole, but it is welcome that Google still offers 7 years of software support with full OS updates, Pixel Drops and security patches.

Battery Life

• Remains one of the few Android phones with magnets
• Wired and wireless charging
• 4850mAh battery

Battery life on the Pixel 11 Pro is pretty much what we have come to expect from smaller phones. While some large Android phones have utilised silicon-carbon cells to drastically increase endurance, Google hasn’t done much this year. The cell itself is actually marginally smaller than the one inside the Pixel 10 Pro, at 4850mAh rather than 4870mAh.

This is a phone that’ll require daily charging for anyone but the lightest of users. On quiet usage days, I’d get through an 8 am to 11 pm day with around 45% charge left; that’s after three or so hours of screen time.

On typical days with around five or six hours of screen-on time, the Pixel 11 Pro would be depleted by 10pm. On a few occasions, I needed an evening top-up to get through. These are virtually the same findings I had with the 10 Pro last year.

There are power-saving modes to eke out more juice, and you can pick between two display resolution modes that make a small difference. The phone defaults to a lower resolution of 1080 x 2410, and you have to enable 1280 x 2856 in Settings.

For those who want better endurance, you’re likely to have more luck with the Pixel 11 XL – which has a bigger battery. The larger phone also has faster charging.

In my testing, I found the Pixel 11 Pro typically charges at between 24-26W when paired with a 45W+ charger. There is an option for an Extreme Charging setting, which shuts off background processes to speed things up – and with this enabled, it stuck reliably at 26W. However, you can only turn this mode on when the phone is below 50%, and it needs to be enabled manually each time.

I drained the phone to 0% and then, using the included cable and a fast 60W plug, timed how long it took to reach various increments up to 100%. A full charge took 110 minutes, while 50% took 47 minutes. You can speed that up to 35 minutes with the Extreme Charging mode. 

PixelSnap makes its return, and this is still one of the few Android phones that have magnets inside to make use of the full Qi 2.2 charging standard. If you have MagSafe accessories, as I do, they all work here (size-dependent).

Should you buy it?